Frame would have grinned and Brasch more likely grimaced, but both would have noted the gentle ironies surrounding this small book of short but often intensely interesting writings. Their letters, including email-sized notes on book loans and afternoon teas, have been preserved in beautiful font on thick cream paper, at a price no pauper writer could afford.

The letters, from 1949 to 1978, are torch-beams only. Readers need to go elsewhere for full biographical details. The book begins with Frame’s note sent to ‘Mr Editor’ from Oamaru (1949, between hospital stays). ‘A story. Crumbly and of poor grade. You probably won’t want it. In that case please burn it quickly – quickly – or crush into tinier pieces for Rat Darkness to sneak in and snaffle.’ Charles did not crush the story for Rat Darkness, nor did he reply to her, but he did tell Denis Glover to save it with her other submissions. In 1954 he asks to print one of her poems, and for more of her work, and their correspondence begins. Frame is outwardly diffident at first: ‘I fight off writing, but it has an overtaking habit, like sleep’.

Other writers and places are also briefly, evocatively, lit up. Frame finds England peaceful compared to the United States during the Vietnam era, and then remembers Dunedin in July: ‘… soon, the hills will be shadowed gold with the budding broom and gorse; it rains now, I suppose, and you light fires.’ Brash’s reply describes 1969 Dunedin with a Piggy Muldoon in the Capping Parade, and Hone Tuwhare, Warren Dibble and Ralph Hotere composing ‘a sort of humming top which now seems the centre of the town’s life’. The letters mention many other writers and artists, such as Ruth Dallas, the Baxters (Jacquie getting the children to work to pay off debts, while ‘Jim was up the Wanganui’), Frank Sargeson, Ted Middleton, Bill Manhire as an Icelandic scholar (‘rather sullen and silent’ but whom Frame liked), and even Grace Paley.

However, it is the writers themselves that fascinate most. Frame and Brasch were united in their passion for writing, respect for each other’s work, and affection, which overcame their differences in age, gender, personality and background. Brasch notes in his diary in 1965, ‘Janet shares my interest in moulding language to greater intensity and richness … She is so quick, receptive, all her antennae alive, aware.’

What differentiates them most is that Frame writes, in general, to explore and to reveal, while Brasch conceals his inwardness behind polite warmth and kind practicalities. Even having taken such care, he still fears posterity’s intrusions: ‘I am appalled at the way people fall like wolves on the letters of writers who are still alive or are barely in their graves; it’s a kind of cannibalism, it’s certainly very indecent.’

If personal exposure upsets Brasch, criticism of her work inspires Frame to passionate analysis. When a Landfall reviewer disparages her ‘weakness for metaphor’, she writes ‘… isn’t the need to compare, to perceive relationships the source of all art? … images … are the basisof my life and my need to write, and they all have meaning. The fact that they impede the path of narrative makes me a bad novelist, but, except in some of my stories, I’m not taking the narrative path.’

The editors have filled out the spaces between the letters with much more of Frame’s other writings than Brasch’s, but these give insights into both. Frame describes Brasch to her beloved friend, the American painter, Bill Brown, as a ‘pure earnest bachelor’ who had led a ‘shatteringly lonely life’ until his mid-fifties. When sitting next to Brasch on a plane, ‘I warned him that I would be likely to grab his arm if the plane were being buffeted and he whom I’m sure has remained ungrabbed all his life, suppressed a slight alarm and gallantly said he did not mind.’

The book has faults. Its price and print-run make it inaccessible to most. The printing is not clear on every page, at least on my copy. A little more contextual information would help many readers, for example, being told early on that ‘Ruth’ was Brasch’s secretary for Landfall. I would also have liked to have read all the letters in their entirety.

Despite such criticism, this book is a valuable addition to our understanding of both writers. Its revelations – of Frame’s witty warm compassion and Brasch’s intense privacy and extreme generosity – entice us back to their more formal work. The man who wrote ‘Separation’ (Home Ground 1974) was not ‘ungrabbed’. He also knew that all people are multiple and intertwined, and to create one voice is piercingly difficult:

12

To speak in your own words in your own voice –

How easy it sounds and how hard it is

When nothing that is yours is yours alone

To walk singly yourself who are thousands

Through all that made and makes you day by day

To be and to be nothing, not to own

Not owned, but lightly on the sword edge keep

A dancer’s figure – that is the wind’s art

With you who are blood and water, wind and stone.

‘Shoriken’ (Home Ground 1974)

NICKY CHAPMAN is a writer, editor and tutor, who shares Brasch’s and Frame’s strong connections to Otago. She lives in Port Chalmers, near Dunedin.

Weighing in at a substantial 1.2 kilogrammes, this solid volume carries within its wrist-twisting four hundred plus pages, the freight of a lifetime’s scholarship. Reviewing it now, a few weeks after Judith Binney’s early death at seventy – when she might easily have worked on fruitfully for another decade – it is difficult to avoid a valedictory note in a review that should legitimately be solely concerned with the text itself, a work that must now earn its keep independently of its author’s life, or death. That said, it will be necessary – and fitting – at the conclusion of this article to utter a poroporoaki in Te Reo Māori, the language of the world she set out to map some forty years ago. And it is the connection between the concept of oral history and its relation to the written word – a linkage that is central to Binney’s project – that will be the necessary focus here.

The book is a chronological series of collected articles that trace her intellectual development, through a Pākehā revision of Māori histories from 1975 until 2010. It begins with a close examination of missionary lives, goes on to discuss Māori Christianity, the rise of Te Kooti and Tūhoe prophets, Tūhoe and the land, oral histories and women’s stories. In what must surely now be seen as something of a Festschrift in her honour, the collection begins with a 1975 paper revealing the Rev. William Yates’ homosexuality, and his inner torments in attempting to reconcile his evangelical faith with a prediliction for Māori boys. The Māori Renaissance and the parallel rise of a new generation of Pākehā baby-boom historians began to coalesce at the time of these early publications. Binney was taught by Keith Sinclair, and while born in 1940 – and so not exactly in the same cohort as James Belich, Matthew Wright and Paul Moon – she is charged with the power of the same deconstructive zeitgeist that actively dethroned old Pākehā ‘saints’ while resurrecting and sanctifying many old Māori ‘sinners’.

Helen Watson-WhiteReading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World, Lydia Wevers (Victoria University Press, 2010), 344 pp., $40.00‘I suffer from an illness, an illness which has no cure, no limit and no end. It’s compulsive, expensive, consuming and addictive, it fills my house and my life and my time…’

In her 2004 essay ‘On Reading’, Lydia Wevers identifies what was described in Fraser’s Magazine in 1847 as ‘book-love’: the passion that drives (it seems) everyone’s purpose as well as her own in this study of a colonial library. Reading on the Farm presents a richly detailed record of nineteenth-century life at the Beetham family’s Brancepeth Station in the Wairarapa — and by implication, in colonial New Zealand generally. Wevers’s story-telling style mixes the personal and the academic in a way that should appeal to a wide readership of bibliophiles.

This is not, however, a straightforward read, an invitation to nostalgia; it is an appreciation but also a critique. The illustrations, for instance, are as important as in any social history — fixing impressions, establishing place and time — but some of their ramifications are realised only when you’ve taken in the text. In its need to interpret puzzling visual signs, what sets out to be an academic monograph (with excellent notes, index, bibliography) assumes the intriguing character of a murder mystery.